C2-SENSE

C2-SENSE project’s main objective is to develop a profile based Emergency Interoperability Framework by the use of existing standards and semantically enriched Web services to expose the functionalities of C2 Systems, Sensor Systems and other emergency/crisis management systems. This will be developed in three steps:

• First, an Emergency Domain Inventory will be created by surveying existing standards, real life use cases of sensors, devices, C2 systems and emergency management architectures for different scenarios in security field.
• Based on this inventory, a common Emergency Domain Ontology will be developed to gather all stakeholders’ knowledge in a unique and flexible data model.
• Finally, by using the concepts in this ontology, by also taking into account both functional and operational requirements as well as different countries’ cultural, linguistic and legal issues, Emergency Interoperability Profiles that will constitute the framework will be developed.

The necessary standardization activities will be initiated to evolve C2-SENSE Emergency Interoperability Framework into a standard specification for interoperability between Sensor Systems and C2 Systems. C2-SENSE will assess its outcomes in a realistic “Flood Scenario in Italy” pilot to ensure that the developed technologies are generic and applicable in a real life setting.

Effective management of emergencies, crises and disasters depends on timely available, reliable and intelligible information. To achieve this, many different organizations having different Command and Control (C2) Systems and Sensor Systems have to cooperate and this cooperation would only be possible through interoperability. However, without standards and well-defined specifications, the interoperability of these systems can be quite challenging, technologically complex, time consuming and expensive. Furthermore, although there are commonly used standards and specifications (addressing also different layers in the communication stack) in the command and control, sensor and emergency management domains, there is no single specification of using these standards together in an emergency situation. These dispersed standards and specifications in these domains create a crucial interoperability challenge. To address this challenge, in C2-SENSE Project, a “Profiling” approach will be used to achieve seamless interoperability by addressing all the layers of the communication stack in the security field.

In C2-SENSE project, SRDC will develop the emergency profiles and corresponding software tools for the Information Interoperability Layer. Specifically, the Semantic Interoperability Layer will be developed by SRDC. Meanwhile, SRDC will also be active in Knowledge Layer where an Emergency Profile Definition Language (EPDL) are developed and Aligned Procedures Layer where generic profiles are specialized for specific organizations/incidents. Having extensive experience in the certification field, SRDC is responsible for the development of Conformance and Interoperability Testing Mechanisms and Certification. C2-SENSE will closely follow the developments in GITB and adapt TestBATN Framework to the emergency domain testing requirements which also involve the upper layers of the Interoperability Stack.